Posts from March 2016 (44)

Team Ratings for Round 5

The basic method is described on my Department home page.

Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 33 matches played, 19 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 57.6%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 5

Here are the predictions for Round 5. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 4

The basic method is described on my Department home page.

Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 24 matches played, 14 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 58.3%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 4

Here are the predictions for Round 4. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

From the Guardian (slightly outside our usual beat, but noted by Robin Evans on Twitter)

The UK is the world’s third largest lamb exporter – after Australia and New Zealand – with just over a third of the market.

That can’t be true. Even if Australia and New Zealand and the UK were the only exporters, the UK being in third place would mean it had to have less than a third of the market.  The (UK) Agriculture & Horticulture Development Board (PDF) thinks it’s about 9% — yes, that’s not just lamb, but lamb makes up most of the NZ and Oz exports.

I’m not sure what the ‘just over a third’ really is. It might be the proportion of UK-raised lamb that is exported.

It’s also interesting to see the Guardian slant on the story: that supermarkets should refuse to stock any imported lamb at this time of the year and insist on English lamb raised indoors, out of season.

• Many people have hypothesized, plausibly, that giving people risk estimates for disease based on genetics would encourage them to behave more healthily. The available evidence isn’t supportive.

• The Herald, for the second time in a week or so,  treats a bogus poll as supporting evidence for something.

• Expensive but extremely effective hepatitis C drugs: an example of the sort of thing Pharmac might well want to fund ahead of Keytruda.

• Early newspaper data graphics for the 1849 cholera epidemic

• Barfoot & Thompson surveyed a bunch of young non-home-owning people in Auckland to ask them what they expected to pay for a house. I would have thought knowing more about housing prices than your customers was part of the point of having real estate agents. The Herald put it on the front page, too.

• In the US, doctors who get more money from drug and device companies tend to prescribe expensive drugs more.  Note: not only is this correlation, but conceivably it could be a good thing — perhaps they are just more knowledgeable.  Or, of course, not.

Each week, we would like to invite readers of Stats Chat to submit nominations for our Stat of the Week competition and be in with the chance to win an iTunes voucher.

Here’s how it works:

• Anyone may add a comment on this post to nominate their Stat of the Week candidate before midday Friday March 25 2016.
• Statistics can be bad, exemplary or fascinating.
• The statistic must be in the NZ media during the period of March 19 – 25 2016 inclusive.
• Quote the statistic, when and where it was published and tell us why it should be our Stat of the Week.

Next Monday at midday we’ll announce the winner of this week’s Stat of the Week competition, and start a new one.

(more…)

If you’d like to comment on or debate any of this week’s Stat of the Week nominations, please do so below!

Q: Did you see snake venom can cure Alzheimer’s Disease now?

A: I saw the story in Stuff.

Q: Do you have to get bitten by the pretty green snake?

A: No, you don’t, though you’d probably need the compound from the venom injected into your spine. And the snake isn’t green.

Q: So it’s mice? It looks green

A: The photo is of the wrong snake, and the research isn’t even in mice. The last sentence of the story says “The treatment will now be trialled in mice before it can be considered as a viable treatment for humans.”

Q: But it could work?

A: It could, though so far treatments that try to dismantle amyloid plaques have ranged from ineffective to actively harmful in treating the actual disease. There’s even a respectable hypothesis that amyloid starts off as a protective response against lurking bacteria or viruses that activate in the brain in old age. It’s all very unclear and depressing.

Q: But there seem to be lots of natural products that are promising cures. It’s not just the snakes, look at the ‘Read More’ links from the story:

A: The chocolate link isn’t about Alzheimer’s at all. The maple syrup story talks about compounds in maple syrup, and the need for ‘further animal trials’. The ‘cheap pill’ trial “did not investigate whether resveratrol has any effect on memory or improving other symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.”  The blueberries had a small effect in one tiny, short-term trial and a different small effect in another tiny, short-term trial.  And the sleep disruption isn’t something you could do much about, even if it is more than correlation.

Q: So why are there all these unreliable or preliminary reports being published?

A: Because there isn’t any other good news. If you have a really hard problem, nearly all the people who say they have solutions will be wrong, and won’t have checked their solutions thoroughly.

Q: I see. It’s like aliens.

A: <blinks> Huh?

Q: Lots of serious researchers are looking for alien life, but all the people who say they’ve actually found it are talking about crop circles and UFOs, and everything else is just like “we’ve found a planet that’s not as far from being habitable as the previous ones were”

A: Pretty much.

Unfiltered.news is a beautiful visualisation of what news topics are less covered in your country (or any selected country) than on average for the world:

For a lot of these topics it will be obvious why they’re just not that relevant, but not always.

(via Harkanwal Singh)

From the ‘Parenting’ section of the Stuff Life & Style page:

That’s both wrong and implausible.  If Dravet syndrome, a serious epileptic condition, was about as common as, say, autism spectrum disorder, you’d have heard of it already.

The actual rate is about 1 in 20,000, two hundred times lower than the teaser says. If you click through to the story and read it carefully you’ll see that Dravet Syndrome is responsible for about 1% of childhood epilepsy.

So, how did the numbers get so badly messed up? Well, one contributing factor is probably that the story was taken from The Conversation, and whoever did the editing job didn’t read it carefully enough.  As seems to often happen with pieces taken from The Conversation, there’s no attribution either to the original publisher or the authors, and all but two of the nine links in the original have been scrubbed.

The Conversation encourages republication of the pieces they publish, but the Creative Commons license they use requires that republishers attribute the piece and indicate if changes have been made.  I don’t know if the NZ news sites have negotiated an alternative deal, but I can’t see why lack of attribution would be desirable — I thought the by-line was as sacred to journalists as to academics.

Team Ratings for Round 4

The basic method is described on my Department home page.

Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 24 matches played, 15 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 62.5%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 4

Here are the predictions for Round 4. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.